There is a meme, possibly due to Carl Sagan, that shows how insignificant we are compared to the universe. There is a different way of looking at who and what we are. While the world of subatomic particles gets all the gee, whiz news, we live in the world of electrons. Everything that we are familiar with in our daily lives (if you except the sun) is an artifact of how electrons in just four possibilities, s, p, d, and f, arrange themselves in the outermost electron "shell" of atoms. There is, in fact, a form of the periodic table that makes this clear, and it was discovered by a man who died in 1937.
Posted on: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:15:41 +0000